Lavinia Greenlaw's childhood reminiscences feel strangely familiar: the horrific accidents (she impaled her four-year-old self on a garden cane), the hairdo disasters (she snipped a bald patch on to her best friend Cara), the awkward, slow dancing (the shuffling gait, the gaze that rests anywhere but on her partner) and the utter self-absorption (she failed to notice the implosion of her parents' marriage). Her attraction to music manifested itself in a progression from Bob Dylan to Marvin Gaye to the Jam to Joy Division - with stops for Mozart and English country dancing - and in long hours spent listening to John Peel or poring over NME and Melody Maker. Out of this slight, amusing, self-indulgent collection of memories, Greenlaw's unflinching eye and spare, sophisticated prose render a rare and quite beautiful book.

A Voyage Round John MortimerValerie GrovePenguin £9.99

John Mortimer has never been quite able to confine himself to one subject: divorce lawyer, QC, consummate creator of all manner of novels, plays, reviews and columns, not to mention memoirist, bon vivant, pugilistic defender of free speech and fox hunting. Indeed, in spite of two long-lasting relationships, one tumultuous and one contented, he has always acted 'as if he wasn't married'. Enjoying the best of both worlds, his biographer Valerie Grove benefits from the muck raked up by her unauthorised predecessor Graham Lord - the later affairs, the secret son with actress Wendy Craig - along with the extensive access she had to Mortimer's family and private documents. She creates a firm, honest, intimate and detailed portrait of a man who has spent a lifetime building his own myth.

Rape: A History from 1860 to the PresentJoanna BourkeVirago £12.99

Marital rape did not exist in law until the early Nineties. A husband could not beat his wife but, as Joanna Bourke tartly observes: 'Her vagina was legally assumed to be at his beck and call.' She then points out that when Rhett Butler sweeps a struggling Scarlett O'Hara up to bed in Gone With the Wind, the fiction they enact - the 'no' that means 'yes' - is as common to romance novels as it is to rape trials. Bourke forays fearlessly into the traditional breeding grounds of sexual abuse: prisons, the military, the home. By weeding steadily through myths, polemics and legal cant, and the testimony of victims and aggressors, she clarifies and contextualises a bewilderingly horrific crime. In an era in which rape conviction rates have dropped to astounding lows, it is a necessary, and necessarily uncomfortable, study.

Science and Religion: A Very Brief IntroductionThomas DixonOxford University Press £7.99

Never mind Judge Jones's 2005 ruling that the adoption of 'intelligent design' in schools was, constitutionally speaking, 'a breathtaking inanity': if 10,000 US Christian clergy signed a document supporting the teaching of evolution, then why is creationist theory still so popular in America? The answer, according to Thomas Dixon, is control. Ever since medieval Islamic scholars decided that 'whoever does not know astronomy and anatomy is deficient in the knowledge of God', the debate between science and religion has been more about politics than ideological incompatibility. And, happily, Dixon's bracing initiation is even-handed enough to inspire jolts of defensive ire in readers of every stripe.